Plan Your Trip Times Picks

600 Miles in 18 Hours

By DOUGLAS FRANTZ

Published: September 16, 2001

THERE are few good reasons to be on the only road from Almaty in southern Kazakhstan to the Qaraghandy region in the central part of the vast country. But this was a trip born of necessity. I had business in the bleak steel town of Temirtau and the only flight to the airport in nearby Qaraghandy was full -- for the next week.

Internal airlines can be iffy in Central Asia. Sometimes you show up for a supposedly full flight and find plenty of empty seats. Other times you arrive, ticket in hand, only to discover there is no room. I decided to drive, along with a photographer.

On the map, it does not look like a tough trip. The thin red line of highway swings north out of Almaty, skirts the wide end of Balqash Koli, the country's largest lake, and winds north to Qaraghandy. From there it is a short hop west to Temirtau. The journey measured about 610 miles.

The first clue that all was not what it appeared came from the young woman at Central Asia Tourism in Almaty. When we asked about renting a car and driving ourselves to Temirtau, she looked stricken and called for a supervisor.

Sure, the supervisor said, they would rent us a car, but we would have to use their driver. The price seemed steep -- $480 round trip in a Mitsubishi Pajero, which is similar to a Jeep, and another $40 for two nights of accommodation for the driver. We haggled to no avail. Take it or leave it. We asked about air-conditioning and were told it would cost twice as much.

''Roll down the windows,'' the supervisor said.

Less than an hour outside Almaty the next morning, it was evident the trip required an experienced driver. A highway crew was working on the road, so we were shunted off to a rutted mud path that we shared with huge tractor-trailer rigs and Soviet-built Lada passenger cars held together with baling wire.

That was the way it went for the next few hundred miles -- stretches of the bumpiest, most deeply cratered pathways imaginable interspersed with short stretches of new blacktop highway, only some of them open to traffic.

We had been told the drive would take 10 to 12 hours. But the road quality made the estimate seem optimistic. When asked, Maksim, the driver, said: ''Eighteen to twenty hours. I just did it last week.'' As an afterthought, he said the bad roads were still to come.

After a year traveling throughout the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia, I had come to expect rough roads and long trips. The governments have limited resources, and there has been no upkeep to most roads at least in the 10 years since the end of the Soviet Union. Besides, most of these countries were purposely isolated for defensive reasons, so there was no need for superhighways.

A two-day trip on the only road crossing southern Kyrgyzstan late last year in a rugged four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser had been a bone-rattling affair without an inch of asphalt in sight. Even the streets of Bishkek, the capital, were filled with so many potholes they were like a slalom course.

Kazakhstan, the richest of the countries and four times the size of Texas, was building a modern highway, though there was a lot of work to be done, and the slalom-course image was apt here, too.

The great steppes of Central Asia stretch to the horizon, occasionally interrupted by a village or a line of trees. William Moorcroft of the British East India Company, one of the first Westerners to visit the region in the 19th century, found the steppes exotic and lawless. His Russian rival, Mehkti Rafailov, had been escorted by a troop of Cossacks when he explored here.

Our worries were different. Maksim expertly dodged potholes deep enough to swallow the car and big rigs barreling down from Russia toward southern Kazakhstan and the markets beyond in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Northbound we coped with trucks loaded with watermelons and other produce from the Ferghana Valley.

Some trucks and an untold number of the passenger cars no doubt had hidden cargo. The road is heavily used by drug traffickers ferrying heroin and opium from Afghanistan to the markets of Russia and Europe.

The first half of the journey took us along the 54-mile western shore of Balqash Koli,a shallow body slowly shrinking from too much irrigation along the rivers that feed it from western China. Every few hundred yards, local people had set up small stands to sell the giant catfish caught in the lake. Up to six feet long, the fish are smoked, dried and hung along the road in an unappetizing display.

Our supply of junk food and two-liter bottles of water would not get us to Temirtau. The only places to eat were small roadside cafes and, with trepidation, we stopped and ordered lunch.

The safest choice seemed to be something cooked well over the open fire, so everyone went for shashlyk, the Kazak kebab. I ate with a prayer, secure in the knowledge I had brought strong antibiotics.

Not long after lunch, we ran into a small herd of camels alongside the road. Staton Winter, the freelance photographer with me, saw them first and asked Maksim to stop.

Hopping out with a camera in each hand, he turned back and asked, ''Aren't you coming?''

I first encountered camels in Saudi Arabia 10 years ago. They are unfriendly, spitting creatures as tricky to handle as a 3-year-old.

''Camels are nasty,'' I said. ''I'll stay here.''

Staton got within 30 feet of the small herd alongside the road. He clicked a few shots until his viewfinder picked up the largest of the beasts, coming toward him at a gallop. He yelled, wheeled and raced back toward the Mitsubishi, the camel in hot pursuit.

Maksim was having a cigarette by the side of the road. He heard the scream and jumped in as the photographer hopped into his seat and slammed the door. We were rolling again, and laughing for the first time in a couple hundred miles.

Fourteen hours into the trip, we were still 60 miles from our destination and Maksim had proved a prophet. The road was bumps on top of mounds, and the vehicle slid sideways as much as it went forward.

WE had managed to chalk up some fast miles by slipping past the barricades and speeding down the uncompleted blacktop at several points. We stopped, however, after the asphalt ended abruptly at the edge of a deep ditch.

There was a beauty to the endless sweep of the steppes, and the setting sun did not turn the sky a dazzling red-orange until almost 11 p.m. By the time we passed through Qaraghandy and headed the last miles to Temirtau, a hot shower was more appealing than the Holy Grail.

It was 2 a.m. at the Ispat Hotel, 18 hours after leaving Almaty, when I stripped off my grime-caked clothes, stepped into the shower and turned the taps. Nothing. I twisted them the other way. Nothing. I stepped out and picked up the phone.

''I'm sorry, sir, no water until morning,'' said the woman at the front desk.

The town had been without water since a main burst five days earlier. The hotel had rigged a system that operated a few hours in the mornings. I asked for two bottles of water, figuring that would work in place of a shower. They arrived within minutes, both icy cold.

Two days later, we fought our way to the front of the line for a flight back to Almaty. Maksim was left to drive back alone.

Photo: Fellow travelers somewhere between Almaty and Temirtau. (Staton Winter for The New York Times)

DOUGLAS FRANTZ is chief of the Istanbul bureau of The New York Times.

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